FSU

Mainstays of management: people and data

Managing users and data are two of the most important categories of system administration duties. We will look at what it means to add and remove both people and data.

Adding local (real) users: Unix/Linux

Adding local (real) users: Unix

Adding local (real) users: Unix

$ w
 06:44:59 up 2 days,  1:45,  6 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.05
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
testtest tty2     -                06:41    2:41   0.00s  0.00s -bash
testtest tty3     -                06:42    1:57   0.00s  0.00s -bash
$ who
testtest01 tty2         2008-06-04 06:41
testtest02 tty3         2008-06-04 06:42
[fsucs@acer1 Slides]$ 

Adding local (real) users: Unix

For example:

user1:f9cPz5ilB5N0o:501:501:USER1:/home/faculty/user1:/bin/tcsh

langley:$6$k6H7I90O5bOvcUi/$cCYlXCnSkTj6cZnFV35FCpO.xFXqQMVKExjnA
qfFi2tO53pxDdx1lKxxd30eFXEYWgaq3x/.M7os3ehrFpL1W0:USER1:/home/fac
ulty/user1:/bin/tcsh

Adding users: Unix

Unix users: grouping them

Unix users: grouping them

Unix users: grouping them

root:x:0:root
bin:x:1:root,bin,daemon
daemon:x:2:root,bin,daemon
sys:x:3:root,bin,adm
adm:x:4:root,adm,daemon
tty:x:5:
disk:x:6:root
lp:x:7:daemon,lp
mem:x:8:
kmem:x:9:
wheel:x:10:root

Unix/Linux: making user accounts

Unix: making user accounts

mkdir /home/faculty/user1
cp /etc/skel/.[A-Za-z]* /home/faculty/user1
chmod 700 /home/faculty/user1 
chown -R user1:user1 /home/faculty/user1
 
  ## OR, IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE ':' SYNTAX ##
  
chown -R user1 /home/faculty/user1
chgrp -R user1 /home/faculty/user1

Unix: making user accounts

You can do these steps manually, use a vendor-supplied script/program, or write your own.

Also, there are often GUIs, or you can use webmin.

Unix/Linux: shadow password files

Most Unix/Linux distributions now use a ``shadow'' password file in addition to the main password file -- a shadow password file moves the encrypted password out of the publicly-readable /etc/passwd file and into a root-accessible-only file. Why is this a good idea? See ``John the Ripper'' or ``LOPHTCRACK'' -- any hacker can try to systematically guess passwords with such programs.

Unix/Linux: shadow password files

Also allows for creation of new fields to support password rules, password aging, etc. Examples:

Unix/Linux: removing users

Removing Unix/Linux users -- you can just undo the steps above!

However, it can be problematic to find all files owned by the user, if you gave them access to directories outside of their home directory.

Or, find / -user USERNAME -print -- but that only works as long as the username is still in the password file. Otherwise, you need to use find / -uid UID -print

Unix: removing users

Unix/Linux: removing users

You usually will want to archive (or otherwise preserve) the user data. These days, a memory stick can be one of these ways to give users permanent copies of their user data.

Unix/Linux: disabling user accounts

The easiest is usually to disable their login shell:
user1:x:501:501:USER1:/home/user1:/sbin/nologin 
user2:x:502:502:USER2:/home/user2:/bin/false

You can put text into /etc/nologin.txt to modify the message from the nologin program, but it isn't customizable per user.

Unix/Linux /etc/shells

/etc/shells keeps a list of trusted shells users can change to via ``chsh'' /etc/shells is also consulted by other programs to make sure that a shell is a ``legitimate'' one for that system; in the past, even sendmail used to consult this file.

Unix/Linux /etc/shells

In general, this file is becoming much less used than it was in the past. Here's a current Fedora /etc/shells, which is very minimalistic:

$ cat /etc/shells
/bin/sh
/bin/bash
/sbin/nologin

/bin/passwd binary

treating /etc/passwd as a critical file

On a busy machine, you might create a cron script to make backups, something like:

cp /saved/passwd.1 /saved/passwd.2
cp /saved/passwd.0 /saved/passwd.1
cp /etc/passwd /saved/passwd.0 

treating /etc/passwd as a critical file

treating /etc/passwd as a critical file

[root@sophie root]# pwck
user adm: directory /var/adm does not exist
user gopher: directory /var/gopher does not exist
user ident: directory /home/ident does not exist
user pcap: directory /var/arpwatch does not exist
user vmail: directory /home/vmail does not exist
pwck: no changes

treating /etc/passwd as a critical file

You can occasionally run password crackers to see if your users are putting in obvious passwords (notice this is less of a problem if you require them to have good passwords).

Setting up specialized accounts

Sometimes it is desirable to create limited accounts that serve only a single purpose, such as with the old "sync" user login, or as we saw with the "postgres" account.

Windows user management

Adding local Windows users is quite easy, but the actual bitkeeping of the user information is far more recondite.

Data: UNIX Filesystems

Turning to the data management side, we have seen many new filesystems in the last few years: zfs, nilfs, btrfs, ext4 for example, and we have seen neat ideas such as FUSE which give users the ability to handle items structured as a filesystem in user-space, such as sshfs provides.

UNIX Filesystems

Traditionally, we have created our device files in /dev. Device files provide a connection between a device and standard UNIX system calls referencing those devices.

For UNIX filesystems, this has been a steady and monotonic weakening of connection between physical disk drive partitions and their eventual mount point(s).

UNIX Filesystems — a growing subject!

Identified by a ``major'' and a ``minor'' device number, as well as type ``b'' (block) or ``c'' (character, or raw device) -- these examples are from Linux:

root# ls -l /dev/
 
 [ ... ]

brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   0 Sep  9  2004 hda
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   1 Sep  9  2004 hda1
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  10 Sep  9  2004 hda10
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  11 Sep  9  2004 hda11
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  12 Sep  9  2004 hda12
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  13 Sep  9  2004 hda13
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  14 Sep  9  2004 hda14
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  15 Sep  9  2004 hda15
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  16 Sep  9  2004 hda16
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  17 Sep  9  2004 hda17
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  18 Sep  9  2004 hda18
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  19 Sep  9  2004 hda19
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   2 Sep  9  2004 hda2

brw-rw----  1 root    disk      8,   0 2010-09-27 08:58 sda
brw-rw----  1 root    disk      8,   1 2010-09-27 08:58 sda1
brw-rw----  1 root    disk      8,   2 2010-09-27 08:58 sda2
brw-rw----  1 root    disk      8,   5 2010-09-27 08:58 sda5

 [ ... ]

Unix/Linux: fsck

One task that is important for administrators but rarely to users is that of fsck: file system consistency checking. As a system administrator, running fsck can be one of the more exciting tasks after an unclean shutdown -- use the -y option for fastest runs.

Unix/Linux: devices and filesystems

Filesystems have to exist somewhere: they can be in memory, such as a ``RAM'' filesystem, they can be on a hard disk drive, or more exotic venues. But the ones that system administrators generally care the most about are those that are on hard disk drives or SSDs. While there has been quite a bit of movement to add logical layers to the device management process, we still use partitions directly to host filesystems --- just take a look with df on your systems.

/dev/sda1               241116     75549    153119  34% /boot
    

Unix/Linux: Device Naming conventions

The naming conventions and major/minor device numbers are very machine-specific. See LAH for some specifics on disk and tape device names. For Linux machines, you can also do a locate devices.txt to see if you can find a local copy, or for the most recent version, go to http://www.lanana.org/docs/device-list/ (This link seems to be broken, at September 30, 2010 at 10:00am!)

Unix/Linux: Device Naming conventions

On modern Linux machines, MAKEDEV is a binary or a shell script (Debian, for instance, uses a shell version very similar to the old BSD version), usually located in /sbin (in the old days, this program was often in /dev!) Look at the version from Mint 8.0: MAKEDEV.

As a shell script, typically /sbin/MAKEDEV would call the program mknod, which was a wrapper around calls to the mknod(2):

Unix: Device Naming conventions

       int mknod(const char *pathname, mode_t mode, 
                 dev_t dev);

DESCRIPTION
       The  system  call mknod creates a filesystem node 
       (file, device special file or named pipe) named 
       pathname, with attributes specified  by  mode
       and dev.

          [ ... ]

Unix: Device Naming conventions

       The  file  type  must  be  one of S_IFREG, S_IFCHR, 
       S_IFBLK, S_IFIFO or S_IFSOCK to specify a normal 
       file (which will be created empty),  character  
       special  file,  block  special  file, FIFO (named 
       pipe), or Unix domain socket, respectively.  
       (Zero file type  is  equivalent  to  type S_IFREG.)

       If the file type is S_IFCHR or S_IFBLK then dev 
       specifies the major and minor numbers of the newly 
       created device special file; otherwise it is
       ignored.

Unix: Device Naming Conventions

Note that the naming conventions vary even between different versions of the operating system. Solaris, for example, provides backwards compatibility with the old names via soft links.

Unix: Device Naming Conventions

Solaris->ls -l /dev/sd0a /dev/rsd0a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 4 1995 /dev/rsd0a -> rdsk/c0t3d0s0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 May 4 1995 /dev/sd0a -> dsk/c0t3d0s0
Solaris->ls -l rdsk/c0t3d0s0 dsk/c0t3d0s0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 86 May 4 1995 dsk/c0t3d0s0 -> 
  ../../devices/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@4,8400000/
    esp@4,8800000/sd@3,0:a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 90 May 4 1995 rdsk/c0t3d0s0 -> 
  ../../devices/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@4,8400000/
    esp@4,8800000/sd@

Unix: Device Naming Conventions

Solaris->ls -l /dev/sd0a /dev/rsd0a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 4 1995 /dev/rsd0a -> rdsk/c0t3d0s0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 May 4 1995 /dev/sd0a -> dsk/c0t3d0s0
Solaris->ls -l rdsk/c0t3d0s0 dsk/c0t3d0s0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 86 May 4 1995 dsk/c0t3d0s0 -> 
  ../../devices/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@4,8400000/
  esp@4,8800000/sd@3,0:a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 90 May 4 1995 rdsk/c0t3d0s0 -> 
  ../../devices/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@4,8400000/
  esp@4,8800000/sd@3,0:a,raw 

Unix: Device Naming Conventions

Luckily, the actual naming convention that counts is the one that is used by the various sysadmin tools (fsck, mount, etc.).

Inside the filesystem: UNIX Symbolic links

As mentioned earlier, UNIX symbolic links are a very useful system administration tool.

Inside the filesystem: UNIX Symbolic links

As previously mentioned, symbolic links are nothing but a regular file with a bit set to indicate that it is a symbolic link; the contents of the file are the link value itself:

[langley@sophie Slides]$ ln -s /etc/passwd
[langley@sophie Slides]$ ls -l passwd
lrwxrwxrwx    1 langley  langley        11 Jan 24 12:01 passwd -> /etc/passwd

Inside the filesystem: UNIX setuid and setgid bits

setuid and setgid on executables -- the effective UID and GID of the user executing the program temporarily becomes the UID and GID of the owner of the file, if the suid and guid bits are set (``chmod 4xxx'', ``chmod 2xxx'', ``chmod 6xxx'', ``chmod u+s'', ``chmod g+s'', etc. -- see ``man chmod'' for details).

Inside the filesystem: UNIX setuid and setgid bits

# ls -l /usr/lib/sendmail
-r-s--x--x 1 root sys 397768 Nov 24 1998 /usr/lib/sendmail 

Inside the UNIX filesystem: the ``sticky'' bit

Old semantics: On a plain file, the sticky bit indicated that the binary should remain in memory after the last user finishes executing the text segment -- the program ``sticks'' in memory. Typically only settable by root and used to keep commonly-used programs in memory for quicker response.

This older use of the sticky bit has pretty much fallen out of use with quicker machines and kernels with better memory models.

UNIX Sticky bit

On a directory, the sticky bit still does mean something useful (from ``man -s 2 chmod''):

If a directory is writable and has S_ISVTX (the sticky bit) set, files within that directory can be removed or renamed only if one or more of the following is true (see unlink(2) and rename(2)):

UNIX Sticky bit

Example: shared writeable directories - /tmp and /var/spool/mail

   drwxrwsrwt  3 bin staff 512 Jan 27 11:40 /tmp 

Inside the filesystem: UNIX permissions extended

Most Unix kernels and file systems such as those for Linux and OpenSolaris extend the 9-bit ``rwxrwxrwx'' permissions to generalized access control lists (ACLs). You can control file access with more flexibility, using commands like ``aclget'', ``aclput'', ``setfacl'', or ``getfacl''.

UNIX permissions extended

UNIX directory permissions:

Under the filesystem: LVM

Filesystems can also be built over logical devices which might reside on hardware that doesn't directly resemble the logical construction.

One approach is that of LVM, logical volume management. The idea here is to press physical volumes into a system of logical drives. We will talk later in the semester in some detail about LVM.